SliTaz is not dead

February 21, 2012 / gbl08ma / 1 Comment

My last blog post has been about the fact that ReactOS is not a dead open source project, and that in fact they had just released a new alpha version. So to keep with my line of open-source-projects-journalism, today I talk about another open source project, this time a GNU/Linux distro: SliTaz.

You may have heard about this project before: SliTaz has been around since 2007, when the first “cooking” version of the distro was released. But what is SliTaz? As it says on the official website, it is “a free operating system providing a fully featured desktop or server in less than 30 MB”. And indeed, you download an ISO file that weights at about 30MB, which you can burn to a USB stick, CD or DVD, or run on a virtual machine. From there, SliTaz boots to a complete desktop with various utilities and office applications, server-side software and, of course, a web browser. A nice control panel lets you configure the system and install more applications.

The whole system runs in a small amount RAM, meaning you don’t need to install it to a hard disk to be able to use it; when you turn off the computer, the changes made are lost. So, this is not more nor less than a LiveCD that has a size of ~30MB. It is very fast, even on older computers.

Is this news? No, there have been tiny Linux distros around before, and SliTaz itself has been around for a lot of time, as I told. Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux and TinyCore are some examples of other GNU/Linux distros that have the goal of being small in size. I particularly like SliTaz because of its uniqueness: a unique packaging system (tazpkg), unique utilities, and a unique look too. DSL and Puppy Linux are already too “big” for me, and TinyCore is too small to be useful to me. So SliTaz just got it right for my concept of “tiny Linux distro”.

I don’t use SliTaz every day – it’s not my daily use distro – but I still like it very much and it’s been useful to me a few times. I use to keep around a USB pendrive with a copy of SliTaz installed – one never knows when it may be useful, specially after you’ve installed office tools like Abiword and Gnumeric. Of course, your idea of usefulness certainly varies from mine, and that’s why I like open source: just change it so it works the way it’s useful to you.

There have been no cooking or stable releases of SliTaz recently, and there was a lack of word from the developers. I started to think that the project was slowly becoming abandoned. Fortunately, today I checked their website, and this is what I see: news! Well, not really in the news section, but a blog post: Lack of news but work never stops.

So, in conclusion, it seems the project is still active, the only problem is that everyone is too busy to release cooking versions and write press-releases. And it looks like the team is working to get a cooking version out soon, which is great news, since the latest cooking was in May of last year and it’s out of date when compared to the work that’s been done on the repositories since that time.